Li Wen
李纹
“Water Flowing Cold by the Stone”
Her Story
She arrives by accident. In Chapter 49 three separate parties of relatives are travelling to the capital at once, moor at the same landing halfway, discover they are connected by marriage, and come the rest of the way together: Xing Xiuyan with her parents, Wang Xifeng’s brother Wang Ren, and Li Wan’s widowed aunt with two daughters — 大名李纹，次名李绮. The aunt does not want to impose. Grandmother Jia overrules her, and the three of them are installed at Sweet Rice Village 稻香村 with Li Wan.
Li Wen is the elder. The novel gives her no birthday, no illness, no marriage and no death. What it gives her is the best winter in the book. Baoyu, seeing the new arrivals, says the sky must have been holding this much beauty in reserve and he has been a frog at the bottom of a well; the servants say the girls look like four spring onions tied in a bunch. When the poetry club is recounted she is one of the five 不算外 — not outsiders.
Chapter 50, at Reed Snow Cottage: the company links a poem line by line in the snow and she supplies 阳回斗转杓. Afterwards, at the lantern-riddle party in Warm Fragrance Burrow, she sets 水向石边流出冷 — water runs cold beside the stone — for the name of an ancient man. The answer is Shan Tao 山涛.
Chapter 81 gives her one more scene. She is among the four young women fishing at the Smartweed Bank; her hook turns the wrong way and takes nothing, and when it is straightened she lands a crucian carp two inches long. Then the novel puts her down and does not pick her up again.
In Xiang Li's Hands
The snow sheet. A crimson hood is drawn over her head and shoulders like a cowl, over a white robe with pale green sash-ends, and a long crimson train floods the bottom third of the paper. Both hands are raised at her throat, holding a small yellow-green thing the painting does not resolve; a jade bangle sits at the wrist. Behind her is a wet grey-blue thicket of bare trunks flecked with yellow and white — winter plum, or snow, deliberately not decided. There is no bare paper anywhere. Of all the visitors she gets the fullest weather.
The Calligraphy
李纹 stands at the upper right in a loose running hand, surname before given name. Most sheets in this collection give the personal name alone, the form used by people inside a household who need no surname to know who is meant; here the 李 stays on. She is lodged in the Jia compound but never absorbed into it, and the inscription keeps her family in front of her.
Connections
- Li Wan 李纨 — her cousin, in whose courtyard she and her sister are lodged from Chapter 49.
- Li Qi 李绮 — her younger sister, who arrives with her, writes with her, and fishes beside her.
- Jia Mu 贾母 — overrode her mother’s refusal and kept the family in the house.
- Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 — arrived in the same convoy and is one of the four beauties fishing with her in Chapter 81.
- Jia Tanchun 贾探春 — first to land a fish that morning, and the presiding hand of the poetry club she is counted into.
Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · You Erjie 尤二姐 · You Sanjie 尤三姐 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Li Qi 李绮 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · You Shi 尤氏 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more
Named on these pages Li Qi 李绮 · Li Shenniang 李婶娘
Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses
